


An Eye in the Dark

by NixKat



Category: Mushishi, Naruto
Genre: Adoption, Crossover, Gen, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:32:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8885725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NixKat/pseuds/NixKat
Summary: Ginko always new that he would die prematurely to one mushi or another. He did not think about if there would be anything after death.  Turns out there's a lot for him to do, most of it involving a strange blond child.





	1. Born Again

He knew that he was dead.

The pain in his empty eye socket was the first sign that the eternal darkness had come to claim him. He remembered getting his affairs in order, visiting old friends for the last time and following up with old clients. Visiting his favorite places for the last time. He remembered towards the end, isolating himself far away from any human settlements in the deepest darkest forest he could find. The end came in painful consuming darkness and the soothing bright light of his mushi namesake.

He knew that he was deceased… but yet he was conscious. Awake in the world of the tokoyami. His eye saw nothing but the eternal darkness and the glow of other ginko swimming blindly. Was a ginko with an eye still a ginko? He was effectively just a ‘fish’ mushi  in the deep. It was a peaceful existence in itself. Though he felt sorry for the humans and mushi that his tokoyami caught for him to eat sometimes. 

Time held no meaning in the unending blackness.

Then there was a light. A hole in the darkness leading to the koumyaku caught his eye. It was certainly something to break the monotony of ‘swim-consume-and-sometimes let someone go’. The tear was swarmed by the other ginko, all attracted to the energy given off by the Life Vein. With his sight he navigated around the writhing fish-shaped masses of tendrils and entered the portal. He felt the edges of the hole slowly constricting as his tail pulled through, shutting out the other ginko.

Waiting for him in the realm of mushi was a procession of light leading away from a branching lifestream. The marching lights followed the meandering golden river and followed the leftmost branch. The ends of the procession too distant to make out either way. As he watched part of the march slowed and formed a gap, ghostly approximations of heads turned his way. Ginko took the hint and joined the mushi banquet.

The march eventually broke from the the realm of mushi into one bathed in sunlight. His tokoyami squirmed away from the dappled sunlight that fell on his white body and he did his best to stay in the shadows without getting out of line. Not that the precession would allow him to leave. In the physical world, the lights of the Law became stark white humanoids covered by an equally pale sheet. Their proportions if paid attention to made it difficult to mistake them for real humans, as did their faint glow.

They stopped in a shady meadow. The endless line became a seated circle of twelve, plus Ginko who made it thirteen. From his right side the mushi representatives of the natural order passed him a beautiful sake cup the color of a deep lush forest. It was filled to the brim with sweet fruity fragrant kouki. Since Ginko’s current form did not possess hands, the other mushi placed the drink on the soft bed of moss in front of him. From Ginko’s blind side, the mushi passed him a roughly made sake cup the same shade as blood from a cut artery. It was filled halfway with a spicy smelling milk. The hands of the other mushi sat it next to the life wine. 

They expected him to drink. Deciding to save the delicious kouki for last, Ginko opened his carp-like mouth and slurped up the milky substance. It burned his pallet hotter than any of the foreign peppers and domestic spices that he ever tried in his life. Underneath that was a strong current of bitterness that twisted his great piscine body. His tokoyami retreated into his empty eye socket as the many white tendrils that made up his body wove themselves into human arms and legs. His jaw and torso changed shape and smoothed out. Ginko blinked in the first time since he died and was grateful that he had eyelids again. He sat on the soft moss very much aware and uncomfortable that he was stark naked. With his new hands Ginko lifted the green cup and brought it to his face. He drank deeply and slowly as to best savor the sweetness. As he did so the dead gods spoke.

_ The world has changed. There are new things residing here from beyond the stars and walls between worlds. Things too new and too alien to completely heed the Law. In time there will be a child born of the natural and alien, a child bound to a willful independent thing, a child taught new magics. This child has the power to restore balance. _

Ginko neared the end of the kouki. His scalp itched with feeling of weedlike mushi growing out of it.

_ We have chosen you who dared to interfere with our affairs to guide this child. To teach him the ways of the mushi-shi and open this child’s mind to the truth of the world. _

With the last drop of the life wine the mushi banquet vanished into thin air leaving a newly reborn Ginko alone and naked in unfamiliar woods. He held the cups up to his missing eye and allowed the eternal darkness that resided there to take them and hide them somewhere inside himself until he wanted them again. Then he sighed, got to his feet, and started walking.

And walking.

And walking.

And walking.

As he traveled he learned of the changes the dead lords told him about. As something much more mushi than human he easily went unseen as he observed. Unobserved by the humans at least. The talking animals certainly noticed him and they were as curious about his being as he was of theirs. The creatures called demons were another matter entirely. Most of them hostile or at the very least temperamental.

After some searching, Ginko found the mushi masters and found out which of the old clans were still holding on. He shot the breeze with members of the new mushi-shi clans and the strange priests and priestesses that called them allies. He spent a year wandering with the Watari as they mapped the new routes of the life vein. The current Scribe of the Karibusa clan recognised him from the writings of Miss Tanyuu and was eager to hear of his tales with her own ears. He laughed when he found out that his old friend Adashino’s collection of the strange had been turned into an educational museum. 

  
After a decade of aimless wandering Ginko heard a child crying in the night. 


	2. A Child's Cry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ginko find's his charge.

The wailing of a baby lead Ginko to one of the ninja villages. He didn’t like the ninja villages. Firstly because their methods for teaching the next generation were remarkably similar to those of the Minai clan. Treating the lives of children and allies as disposable tools. Manipulating access to information and drilling propaganda into impressionable minds. The other reason he didn’t like ninja villages was because it seemed to defeat the concept of stealth and secrecy for someone, say him, to be able to ask for and receive accurate directions to a specific group of ninjas.

The cries of an infant led Ginko to the only hospital left standing in the disaster area of the Leaf village. The air felt thick with the spicy miasma of demonic chakra and the various mushi feeding on that chakra. He would send a letter for a mushi-shi and a priest to come and purify the area before either the loose chakra coalesced into a new demon or the mushi attracted to the chaos got out of control and started to attack humans. At the baby ward of the hospital, it never ceased to amaze him how much the field of medicine had advanced during his time as a mushi trapped in another dimension, the child was easy to spot. While all of the infants glowed with ether only one had a swarm of demon corpse scavenger mushi swirling around it.

The demon corpse scavenger was a species identified in the last five years. Current consensus was that they were derived from a low atmosphere dwelling subspecies of shouraishi. Unlike its lightning summoning cousins, it  hung around near tree level feeding off the excess chakra of demons. Demon corpse scavengers could attract their favorite food item like their shouraishi cousins, understandably this made them dangerous pests in human settlements.

Ginko swatted the acorn worm-like mushi away from the child. From his medicine box he took a cup and placed a ball of smoldering mushi-tobacco in it. Ginko placed the slowly smoking cup under the medical cradle to further disperse the demon corpse scavengers. He leaned in close to get a good look at the child chosen by the natural order to restore balance.

The child, a clipboard attached to the cradle gave a name of ‘Naruto Uzumaki’, was kinda ugly.

The whisker shaped markings on the kid’s cheeks could have been cute if the baby wasn’t so blotchy and red. Occasionally the infant’s mouth opened to show four white fangs poking from its gums. If anything else the child was obviously demon touched, likely in the womb to have such an unpleasant mutation. The baby was both overly long for a newborn and far too thin to be healthy.

In spite of the infant’s ugliness, the way it grabbed his fingers and nose still brought a smile to his face. 

  
  


Being this deep underground with tons and tons of rock and earth overhead was unsettling, even though he could retreat into his tokoyami to save himself if he had to. Ginko waited unseen by the door to the chamber where they kept his boy. His eye scanned the room to make sure that no one would see him break in. He shifted the weight of the stuffed bags in his hands and used his elbow and pinky to open the door.

“Papa!” As soon as Naruto saw who was at the door he dropped the colorful blocks he was playing with and toddle-ran over to hug Ginko’s legs. He shuffled onwards to the middle of the room where the kid had been playing. He dropped the bags and plopped bown onto the grubby white semi-soft mat that made up most of the floor of the bunker. Books, toy animals, rocks, and sweets spilled out of the fallen bags. The small human clamped to his legs released its grip and dove for the treats.

“So kid, how's it going?” Ginko asked. The only difference in the room since the last time he’d been here was the desk with papers and pencils facing the two way mirror on the opposite wall. The kid grunted around a mouthful of chocolate covered raisins and shrugged. It took him a moment to figure out what his guardian ment and to swallow down the mushy wad of chocolate covered fruit to talk properly.

“I get books on counting and math with the groceries now.” Naruto said nonchalantly as he pulled over the biggest book that the mushi-shi had brought with him. The kid settled in Ginko’s lap with his back to the man’s chest and opened the book on the trees of the world. Ginko grunted back at the kid and considered how far they’d get if he tried to kidnap the boy for a sixth time. Probably not far he admitted to himself. If there was anything that the Leaf ninja were actually good at, it was tracking.

“Naruto, if we finish this whole book i’ll tell you about two different stories involving trees for your bedtime story.” Ginko couldn’t help but return the kid’s beaming, if somewhat too wide and too toothy smile with one of his own. They took turns reading book entries out loud. At some point Naruto got some paper and a pencil and started drawing different leaves and flowers he thought looked pretty. The last page was read out loud by the boy as Ginko made a stew out of the leftovers in the refrigerator (certainly a miracle of modern technology). So after the kid was fed and washed and tucked into his cot Ginko told him first about the story of a man who married a tree woman and then a story about a man who accidentally gained the memories of a very very old tree. If nothing else the mushi-shi was sure that Naruto would be dreaming of foliage and forests for weeks.

The seals covering every square inch of the walls of the bunker made escaping it annoyingly hard. Ginko had to squeeze the plant-like mushi growing from his body under the crack of the door and then blindly unlock it from the outside. If not for the seals he could easily just walk through the walls. While not normally prone to petty acts, it was so far the best way he could inflict some form of punishment on the unpleasant people who thought that serious child neglect was ok without motivating said people to try very had to get rid of him. So on his way out of the village he commanded a difficult to get rid of species of vine to grow over every government building in his line of sight.

In a day or so when he planned to return to visit Naruto with some harmless mushi for the kid to learn about, he’d spoil the hokage’s milk.


End file.
